Shalini Zabaneh wins silver at Central American Games

There is both good and bad reports coming from the Central American Games in Panama, where Belize has a contingent of athletes competing is several disciplines. To start with the good news, female cyclist Shalini Zabaneh won silver in the Individual Time Trial race this morning, coming in behind the rider for Costa Rica. Guatemala’s athlete took third place. Zabaneh now goes on to compete in another race on Saturday. When it comes to the female softball team, the news has taken a bad turn because the team lost its last two games. The ladies went into the semi-finals as the number one team but will now have to settle for the third place medal, which of course is better than none at all. Head coach, Greg Moguel gave us the update.

Via Phone: Greg Moguel, Head Coach, Female National Team

“The female team played El Salvador. I think basically for the rest of the tournament we did not have errors and yesterday unfortunately errors came in and they beat us 7-3. From there we made like four errors and there were four costly errors. Since we lost to them that dropped us in the bottom three and we had to play Panama today. We came out to Panama and we also lost to Panama today 2 to nothing. I still feel that out of this tournament we are still basically the best team. When you look at the average statistic wise, we have been leading in all categories but sometimes when you play the game if you make one little mistake you can lose the entire game and you can lose the whole purpose of what you want to achieve.”

Delahnie Bain

“And in terms of winning a medal, where do we stand?”

Via Phone: Greg Moguel

“We won the third; because we have lost those two games, we would have had to beat Panama to play El Salvador for the gold. Panama is playing Salvador right now for the gold so we ended up with the bronze medal.”

Delahnie Bain

“Coming into semi finals as the number one seed and then now dropping to third, how are the girls doing?”

Via Phone: Greg Moguel

“Well they’re feeling down. They are not happy with the performance in the last two games. They felt that they were doing so good in the regular part of the season and then now at a point like this the bats just slipped up and we couldn’t get the hits them as how we wanted.”

Half of the players will return to Belize on Thursday and the others on Friday.